On January 14, the House Education K-12 Subcommittee recommended to report and refer HB 1831 (Simonds) to House Appropriations on a vote of 5-3. The bill, which is a recommendation of the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) 2023 report on Virginia’s K-12 Funding Formula as well as a recommendation of the Joint Subcommittee on Elementary and Secondary Education Funding, would effectively eliminate the cap on K-12 support positions. VACo provided public testimony in favor of the legislation along with numerous members of the local government and K-12 education communities.
VACo’s 2025 top funding priority is to support legislative action to implement the recommendations of JLARC’s landmark 2023 report on Virginia’s K-12 Funding Formula where they coincide with local prevailing practices. In the near term, VACo encourages prioritization of efforts to restore pre-recession era K-12 funding, especially eliminating the cap on support positions; provide full state support for the actual number of K-12 staff positions employed; and revise the methodology for calculating teacher salaries to reflect the actual salaries more adequately being paid by school divisions. Though progress has been made in recent years by the state in restoring support position funding, fully eliminating the support cap would provide more than $200 million to local governments across the Commonwealth for K-12 education costs being solely funded by localities.
In further detail, HB 1831 would require the Department of Education, (i) in calculating the deduction of federal funds in the Standards of Quality funding formula, to examine actual school division spending on support costs as a percentage of actual school division spending on all public education costs, with certain exceptions such as food service, and (ii) in calculating the costs in the Standards of Quality funding formula beginning with fiscal year 2029, to include all employee benefit costs incurred by a majority of school divisions, including costs related to retirement, health care, life insurance, and payout of earned but unused leave. The bill also requires support services positions to be funded based on a calculation of prevailing costs and prohibits such positions from being subject to any method of funding calculation that caps the number of funded support services positions based on a ratio of such positions to students enrolled in the school division, except for certain support services positions enumerated in the bill.
This bill will likely be joined by additional legislation and budget amendments that will be reported on and supported by VACo. As previously reported, legislation such as HB 1831 is critical to moving forward with much needed funding reforms to the way in which the Commonwealth funds public schools.
VACo Contact: Jeremy R. Bennett